Nothing will change until there is a mass exodus from Flickr – until then they have no reason to pay attention to the odd member here and there. I suggest that all Flickr users drop them this Friday and send them a note telling them why. do you think that Flickr would last for very long with this happening? Stop moaning about this recurrent problem – Do Something!

As somebody with four Flickr Pro accounts and >50,000 photos on Flickr, this is no small concern. But before I pile on or get too freaked, I wonder what the whole story here is. Has Deepa Praven had any contact with the Flickr people? If so, what happened with that?

Ya know, this really, really sucks. Flickr doesn’t care about its users, Zooomr barely works and there’s no future development of that in sight… I long ago stopped using any external service to host the images on my blog. It’s just not worth the risk.

This is the whole problem with Web 2.0. There is really no substitute for a friendly neighborhood ISP, run by someone you know, where you can host whatever you want. Whether it’s google, flickr, twitter, wordpress, blogger, tumblr, even the stores like yahoo, amazon and ebay — they are all places where you can do a lot of work, build a reputation and client base, and then have it all disappear on the whim of some stranger.

Alberto, I’ve nearly stopped uploading to Flickr while I consider alternatives. Of course I have all the originals on drives at home, and I back up on offsite servers online as well. But to lose all the links, comments, tags, etc… that would be bad.

And I’m beginning to think it will be bad, because we’re only starting to see the advertising bubble burst.

Remember that advertising pays for a huge percentage (it might round to all) of the commercially-based “free” services we enjoy, from search to social you-name-it. Oh, and venture capital. That too.

Both will run out. Or will get starved down, especially on services that are neglected by their users and/or their owners. Example: MySpace.

We need to do two things.

First is to get ready to pay more for free stuff. Look to public radio as an early crude model. We’re working on that with ProjectVRM. See

That last one is our Knight News Challenge application. You can help by voting for it.

Second is to develop self-hosted versions of Flickr. Self-hosting is the future we’ll have after commercial hosting services like Flickr start to fail right and left. Fortunately, self-hosting is what the Web was meant to do in the first place, and the architecture is still there. We’ll have our own Flickrs and Zoomrs and Picassas, either on servers at home (ISP restrictions permitting) or in a server rack at the likes of RackSpace. But somebody needs to develop the software.

Fortunately, as I understand it, Flickr has a generous API that does allow the copying off of most data that goes with most photographs. I don’t know if it includes tags, notes or captions — or account data such as favorites. But if they have a heart at all, they will make lifeboats for all that stuff available as their ship starts to sink. Sure hope so.

Of course, in the first scenario above, they could go all-pro. I would welcome that. I’m even willing to pay more for it. Hell, when the average price of first-rate cameras and lenses each run well into four figures, paying, say, $100 per year for hosting of photos isn’t a bad deal. I used to pay that much, easy, per month, for film processing, back in the last millennium.

Deepa Preveen has become another victim of Flickr Account Deletion; her paid pro account is terminated without any intimation while she was working on it. It is not simple and easy for working house wife like her to be active in a field of interactive since last four years with more than six hundred images with everyday communications around the Globe. Certainly I believe she was a fair deal Ambassador of Yahoo Flickr and her stream was an ideal example in all good respects. Yahoo fair deal terms and conditions if we discuss, I have seen so many misappropriated sharing’s even explored in the Front Page. Advertisements to find buyer for the old photo equipments connected with someone’s flickr stream name, fair enough?? Being a Flickr Pro Member I am also confused about an uncertainty. It is disrespectful and unprofessional what they did to Mrs. Praveen. Beware.. the guardian of angels will fly way and perch on other horizons.